JustinHuggler.comhttp://www.justinhuggler.com
Wed, 07 Jun 2017 17:04:00 +0000en-UShourly137886267Theresa May’s gamble, or how to throw away a landslidehttp://www.justinhuggler.com/2017/06/07/theresa-mays-gamble-or-how-to-throw-away-a-landslide/
http://www.justinhuggler.com/2017/06/07/theresa-mays-gamble-or-how-to-throw-away-a-landslide/#respondWed, 07 Jun 2017 17:02:58 +0000http://www.justinhuggler.com/?p=3874The other night, watching the British election party leaders’ debate, I found myself warming to Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy Corbyn! I thought Are you mad? You see, I’m not a natural Corbyn supporter — I’m not even a Labour Party supporter. But it’s been that kind of election, where after an hour or so of the usual tired slogans you find yourself warming to a man who turns up on television with a pot of home-made jam and says if he becomes Prime Minister he’ll use his downtime to tend to his allotment.

It’s been a weird election. Nobody really wanted and Theresa May didn’t need to call it. The conventional wisdom is that she thought it was too easy a chance to ignore. The polls were saying she’d win a landslide. But I’m not so sure: I like to think the gambler’s urge got to her: that one night, in the flat above Downing Street, she was suddenly gripped by the desire to risk it all just for the incredible high that comes from taking a chance and winning. It’s an affliction politicians suffer from: Tony Blair had it, Margaret Thatcher had it, David Cameron had it so bad it was his undoing with one risky referendum too many.

But it was a bigger gamble for Theresa May because she’s never won an election. She’d managed to become Prime Minister by the ancient political art of saying nothing while her rivals destroyed each other, and now she was giving up a life of caution and risking it all on one throw…

Oh to be a fly on the wall at Number 10. What was her reaction when the polling started to come in? When her own manifesto launch turned into a shipwreck? When even the Tory press accused her of running the worst election campaign in memory? Did she shout and swear, throw things at the wall? Did she rail at David Davis, send him shocked and trembling from the room? Did she lock herself away and summon reassuring memories of the time she sacked George Osborne? Or is she as emotionless in private as she is before the cameras?

At any rate, she must be regretting that she ever called this misconceived election. Even if she wins tomorrow, as still seems most likely, her rivals have seen her weakness. She is a wounded lioness, and it can only be a matter of time before Boris the laughing hyena takes her down. Unless she wins really big. The only thing that can save her now is a landslide, but then that’s the deal if you call an election when the polls are predicting a landslide: anything else looks like defeat.

What went wrong? It’s been a topsy-turvy campaign. The Labour cognoscenti have been talking down Corbyn, so desperate are they to be proved right in their belief that he is electoral poison. Whatever happens tomorrow, they’ve already been proved wrong: at the very least he’s given the Conservatives a scare.

If I can find myself warming to Jeremy Corbyn, then anyone can. I think his economic policies won’t work, I think his desire for talks with Isis are plain crazy — how do you negotiate with people who want to bring about the end of the world? — and I can never forgive him for his failure to campaign properly against Brexit.

But here’s the thing: I think Theresa May’s just as bad. Her economic policies are based on wishful fantasies as much as Corbyn’s, only hers are fantasies of a return to some sort of 19th century trading power. Her plan to tackle Isis is to threaten suicide bombers with jail. Her immigration policy is framed around the idea all immigrants are either terrorists or benefits cheats, and a desire to drag Britain back to a 1950s idyll that never was. And I can never forgive her for Brexit either.

The Conservatives chose to play this election as a choice between May and disaster. But as far as I’m concerned the disaster happened a year ago, and the rest is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. She may be a late convert to the virtues of Brexit, but Theresa May has the zeal of the convert and now seems intent not only upon a hard Brexit, but on wrecking relations with the rest of the EU as well.

A word here: I am not what the Brexit brigade like to call a Remoaner: I’m a unilateral Remainer. I live in Berlin. I’ve moved on. But there’s an election and I still have a vote.

And if you ask me to choose between Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn, there really isn’t much to choose on. It’s what Dr Johnson would have called a contest between a louse and a flea. And I wonder how much of the Labour surge in the polls has been people who looked at both and liked neither, and felt that Corbyn at least seemed a man of principle, who believed in what he said, even if much of it was foolish, and had lived his entire life according to his beliefs.

The thing about that sort of surge is it’s the kind that tends to evaporate when people get in the ballot box and look at things in the cold light of day.

Of course, there was another choice. To me the biggest surprise of this election was not that Theresa May lost her massive lead in the polls — I never thought that would hold up. But I expected the Liberal Democrats to be the main beneficiary. They were the only party to speak for the 48 per cent who voted to Remain. Unless you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, there is no home for a Remainer in British politics but the Lib Dems. And yet according to the polls they have failed to make any sort of impression on voters, and may even lose seats.

That, to me, is a lost opportunity. Britain could have done with a voice that spoke out against a Brexit movement that has driven a wedge between it and the Europe of Merkel and Macron, and driven it into the questionable embrace of Donald Trump. The young, in particular, are overwhelmingly Remainers, but it is Corbyn’s Labour that appears to have harnessed the youth vote, not the Lib Dems. Some of the blame here must lie with Tim Farron. He had the best jokes in the leader’s debate, but the job isn’t about being funny. He wasn’t prime ministerial, and he didn’t really seem to be taking the whole thing all that seriously. The Liberal Dems could have done with a little of Emmanuel Macron’s charisma.

Corbyn does not on first glance seem all that charismatic, but it is he who has attracted the biggest rallies in British politics since Churchill, and if he can bring the youth vote out as Macron did in France he may end up Prime Minister yet.

When it comes down to choosing prime ministers, I like to ask which candidate you’d want by your side on a sinking ship, with your enemies closing in and all hope of rescue lost. Winston Churchill had his less attractive side — his attitude towards India was reprehensible — but as he proved in 1940, there was no one better when the chips were down.

Who would you want on the burning deck in 2017? May? Corbyn? Farron? Abandon ship!

]]>http://www.justinhuggler.com/2017/06/07/theresa-mays-gamble-or-how-to-throw-away-a-landslide/feed/03874It’s not about Islam, it’s about Syriahttp://www.justinhuggler.com/2017/06/06/its-not-about-islam-its-about-syria/
http://www.justinhuggler.com/2017/06/06/its-not-about-islam-its-about-syria/#commentsTue, 06 Jun 2017 22:05:16 +0000http://www.justinhuggler.com/?p=3866I was trying to put together some thoughts on the election when the news came in from London. Three nobodies run amok in the heart of the city, people mown down in the streets, women stabbed to death. They murdered the innocent and said they were doing it for God. The script’s become familiar but the horror never gets any less. Fifteen years ago I was covering this sort of madness in the Middle East; now it’s come to Europe and no one seems to know what to do about it.

Enough is enough, things need to change. The politicians speak the tired lines, and everyone agrees: something has to be done before it’s too late, but nobody knows what. Deport them? They’re British. Tougher sentences? They’re ready to die. And people begin to speak the unspeakable: it’s the Muslims, they say, the problem’s Islam. But I don’t think it is. And I don’t think we’ll get to grips with this until we do something about Syria.

First, though, a strange interlude. I was still coming to terms with the grim news when Donald Trump decided this was the moment to get into a pissing contest with the Mayor of London. Even as Sadiq Khan tried to offer some comfort and reassurance to Londoners in their hour of need, he had to contend with the supposed leader of the free world sniping at him on Twitter. Well, I thought, at least we’ve still got the Special Relationship.

It seems Trump objected to Khan telling people not to be alarmed if they saw more armed police on the streets than usual. Donald Trump does not want us to Keep Calm and Carry On; he thinks it’s the time to lose your head and run around screaming like fools and cowards. I’ve long given up trying to understand how Trump’s mind works: I can only imagine he saw the news and felt some desperate infantile need to insert himself into it. All I can say is that Americans may have voted for him, but we didn’t, and we’re under no obligation to respect him.

Enough of Trump: we have serious matters to deal with here, and he is not a serious man. But before we leave him behind, he did say one thing that caught my attention: in the aftermath of the Manchester bombing, he described the men who carry out these attacks as “losers”. And though I think he intended it as little more than an insult, he may have hit upon an important truth. Because they invariably are losers. Nobodies. Young men with nothing going for them. Anis Amri, the Tunisian who drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin was a rejected asylum-seeker who tried to make a living as a drug dealer until he was injured in a fight and got scared. Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, was a drop-out described by friends as “not very bright”, sent to special classes for “people of exceptionally low level”.

They never seem to get the girls. At one point Abedi is said to have punched a young woman in the head because he didn’t like what she was wearing. Didn’t like it, or didn’t like that he couldn’t have what was under it? A pattern is forming here. The young returned jihadi who told a German court he went to Syria to join Isis because his girlfriend rejected him. The others who said they went because they were promised wives. Young men who can’t get what they want: girls, money, respect. They can’t even get noticed. Look at the footage of Khuram Butt, one of the London attackers who was filmed in a documentary about jihadists for Channel 4. Look at the vanity in his eyes when he stages his little stunt with the black Isis flag in Regent’s Park. This is not some fearsome holy warrior in his robes, this is a little boy playing dress up, screaming for attention.

You see where this is going. They’re exactly the sort of young men who have always joined gangs, become separatist guerrillas or mafia enforcers. They are looking for a big identity to hide the littleness they see in themselves. Amri even tried to make it as a drug dealer, but he couldn’t cut it: he became a jihadi because he wasn’t tough enough. Today, if no one else will take you, you don’t go out to the jungle and become a Maoist, you become a foot soldier for Isis.

I don’t think God has anything to do with it. Years ago, in Sri Lanka, I interviewed a Black Tiger: a Tamil Tiger who had sworn to carry out a suicide bombing. The atheist Tamil Tigers were doing suicide bombings long before any Muslims got wind of the tactic. What happens to you after you die, I asked him. “Nothing,” he said. “That’s the end. There’s nothing after death.” Then why do you do it, I asked. “For the cause,” he said. “The cause is more important than me.” The other Tigers were looking at him with a sort of awe, and he was bursting with pride. The truth was he wasn’t interested in what happened after he died, only in what it meant to be a Black Tiger while he was alive.

That’s why I’m not sure it will do much good demanding British Muslims condemn the attacks. Don’t get wrong, I think it’s admirable that 200 imams have refused to say funeral prayers for the murderers of London, I think it would be commendable if the British Muslim community took to the streets to say this is not what Islam is about. But I don’t think it would stop the attacks. Most of these young men are rebelling against their families, against their conservative Muslim fathers. Several of them have got into fights with imams who preached against Isis.

And it’s not a problem that’s confined to the immigrant Muslim community. Several prominent jihadis have been born to Christian or atheist Western families and chosen to convert to Islam. For an entire generation, this is the ultimate act of rebellion, of rejection. Sure, the majority are born into Muslim families: they have less far to travel.

They hate us for our freedoms: George W Bush said that first, and now everyone repeats it, but I don’t think it makes it any truer. It’s not that sophisticated: they just hate us because our society never gave them the attention they crave.

Why, though, has an extremist puritan form of Islam become the lightning conductor for these feelings? That’s where I think Syria comes in. Until 9/11, Islamic extremism was just one in an array of vicious hopeless causes peddling their perverted messages. 9/11 put Islamic extremism at the top of the pile, only for the West’s response to knock it back off again. It’s often overshadowed by the disastrous invasion of Iraq, but the 2001 war in Afghanistan dealt a death blow to the original al-Qaeda.

There was a reason there were relatively few big attacks in the years that followed 9/11, and it was the military defeat al-Qaeda suffered in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda died in Tora Bora: he wanted to face the Americans on the battlefield, but his prized fighters were picked off like rabbits.

I saw al-Qaeda’s light go out in the Middle East. I saw how bin Laden’s picture was quietly taken down from Pakistani shop walls. I remember asking Palestinians what they thought of bin Laden in 2002, and them laughing. “He can’t even take care of himself,” they said. I saw al-Qaeda’s light go out, and I saw it come on again in Iraq, as the Americans got bogged down fighting a Sunni insurgency that was increasingly inspired and led by a new generation of al-Qaedas.

And the most virulent of all was Isis. Which brings us to Syria. Because bitter and disaffected young men do not have to look far for inspiration to commit terrible deeds today. They need look no further than Syria, where Isis has been thumbing its nose at the West for years, beheading our captured citizens, burning our allies’ soldiers alive, crucifying Christians, raping Yezidis, while we do nothing. They just have to tune into the modern version of rebel radio in the form of the internet, where Isis actively recruits them to carry out monstrous attacks like the one in London.

We always make the mistake of trying to refight the last war. We learned too late the folly of the Iraq invasion, and took from it the lesson that we should never get embroiled in the Middle East. Sound thinking, if we’d followed it in the first place. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a vile place but it was no threat to us. But by invading and letting Iraq slide into civil war we set off the chain of events that led to Isis.

Unlike Saddam, Isis are our avowed enemies. They control a swathe of territory which they are using as a base from which to wage war upon us. They are recruiting our disaffected youth as their foot soldiers. And we are content to launch the odd air strike and support their rivals in Iraq, while we do nothing against them in Syria for fear it would help the odious regime of Bashar Assad. This is not a policy, it’s gross negligence.

Letting Isis fester in Syria does no one any good. It’s not helping the Syrians who have to live under the barbaric regime, it’s doing nothing to stem the flood of refugees still streaming towards Europe, and it’s allowing the men who were behind what happened in London to sleep quietly in their beds at night.

Angry young men will always be with us. But if we can dismantle Isis, al-Qaeda and their imitators, we can stop our disaffected youth flocking to their banner.

When I arrived in Baghdad in the hot and frightening summer of 2003, there were still plenty of people prepared to argue that Tony Blair and George Bush had done the right thing by invading Iraq. I remember a distinguished British journalist telling me by the pool at the al-Hamra hotel that things were getting better, as the sound of gunfire echoed in the distance and tracer fire lit up the sky. That morning I had seen an entire bus full of passengers being robbed by highwaymen at gunpoint on the main road to Baghdad, and watched as an American tank opened fire on a busy street.

Things were not getting better; as we now know, the Iraq nightmare was only beginning. But I remember that Tony Blair was not alone in dragging the UK into that tragedy. And as the Chilcot Report was released today, I couldn’t help thinking of the others who cheered our troops all the way to disaster. I coudn’t help feeling they were only to eager to drag Blair to the scaffold, a quick public execution to hide their own guilt.

I remember another British journalist, even more distinguished, who stopped me on my way out of the al-Hamra to complain about my reporting. “What are you doing?” he hissed at me. “Do you want us to lose?”

And I remember a polite dinner party at a British Embassy where one of the guests told me it was all very well to oppose the war before it started, but now that we were in Iraq it was unpatriotic of me not to support it.

That was the reality of 2003, however we try to hide behind the Chilcot report now. Tony Blair did not force Britain kicking and screaming into a war it did not want. He had plenty of cheerleaders. With a couple of notable exceptions, including the Independent which I then worked for, the British press was united in support of the war.

So were MPs. Parliament voted in favour of the invasion by 412 votes to 149. Both the Labour government and the Tory opposition supported the war. Only the Liberal Democrats under Charles Kennedy had the courage to oppose it. All the political heavyweights of the age supported it, except Robin Cook, who had the dignity to resign in protest, and Clare Short, who didn’t find the courage of her convictions until it was too late.

It did not, it is true, have the support of all the British people. A million people marched in London to prevent the war, in what was probably the largest peaceful protest that ancient city has ever seen, but they were ignored. Then, as now, we were the 48 per cent. With the full might of the British Establishment behind him, Blair could afford to dismiss the concerns of people waving placards in the rain, even a million of them.

The Chilcot report tells us that Blair misled us over the mirage of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, and took us to war on faulty intelligence. But I remember well the debate of 2003. People were not taken in. I remember the earnest editorials acknowledged even then that Blair’s intelligence was probably faulty, and that there were almost certainly no WMDs. But they argued we should invade all the same, because it might be the only chance to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

The inconvenient truth we have chosen to forget about 2003 is that an entire section of British society supported Blair’s war not because of the phony WMDs, but because they approved of the Bush doctrine of regime change. They believed it was worth any pretext to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and they cheered on Blair’s lies. In a way, this was our own version of the old colonial “white man’s burden”: the belief that it was up to us to remake the societies of those less privileged in our own image, if necessary by force.

To watch the reaction to the Chilcot report today, you would believe there had been no warnings. You would think Blair alone had spoken, and no one had said that it would not work, that it would be a disaster. You would think Robin Cook had never lived. But there were a million who marched because they knew.

The truth about Iraq is simple, and you do not need the Chilcot report, a work ludicrously longer than War and Peace and the Bible combined, to tell it. Saddam Hussein was a monster. But the idea that killing a monster solves all your problems is a fairy tale for children. When Blair and the British Establishment decided to ally themselves with the Bush regime in order to get rid of Saddam, they swapped one monster for another.

Bush and his cronies’ full reasons for going into Iraq may never be clear. Was it about oil? Was it about a demonstrating American power — “We’re an empire now” — or was it about the man who tried to kill George W’s daddy? It doesn’t really matter. The one thing that was painfully clear in Baghdad, even as early as the summer of 2003, was that it had nothing to do with helping the Iraqi people. If it had, there would have been a plan. There have been police on the streets. The British and Americans would have built the schools and hospitals the country so desperately needed after years of neglect under Saddam.

Instead the streets were lawless. People were shot dead by carjackers as they waited at traffic lights. Children were kidnapped on their way to school and held for ransom, their severed fingers sent to concentrate their parents’ minds. When Iraqis protested at American soldiers who had taken over their children’s school in April 2003, several were shot dead by US troops. Few Westerners had heard of the city where it happened at that point, but it would soon become infamous. Its name was Fallujah.

When I visited Iraq’s top children’s hospital, sewage was flooding the leukaemia ward and dripping from pipes over premature babies’ cots. Blankets lay around stained with rotting blood. There was a severe shortage of medicine and orderlies rolled oxygen cylinders along the floor by hand. When I asked doctors what the Americans had done about the situation, they told me no American had set foot in the hospital. Not a single soldier or occupation official. No one cared.

That was the reality of Blair and the British Establishment’s mission to save Iraq from itself. As for the long-term consequences, they are just as clear. The Iraq invasion caused the Syrian civil war and gave birth to Isis, whatever Blair says. When we invaded, we set off a struggle for control between the Sunni Muslim Iraqi elite and the long repressed Shia majority. Sunni militants flooded to Iraq from across the Middle East to fight both the infidel occupiers and the Shia. The insurgency became a civil war.

The Sunnis lost that civil war and turned their eyes to Syria, where a Sunni majority was ruled by a Shia elite. When the uprising against Bashar Assad began, they hijacked it and turned it into a new phase of the same civil war, that now engulfed two countries. Isis controls territory on both sides of a border it does not recognise. It was born out of this civil war, and it was murdering Syrian and Iraqi Shias long before it attacked Paris and Brussels.

Isis is Blair and Bush’s creation, but the damage they did does not end there. As ever, we are trying to fight the last war instead of the one we are now embroiled in. Blair and Bush’s colossal error in invading an Iraq that did not threaten us has left us too traumatised to respond to genuine danger. We are stupefied, unable to act against an enemy attacking us in the heart of European cities. We had no reason to go to war with Saddam; we are already at war with Isis, whether we like it or not. They have declared war on us, and they are inflicting damage while we wring our hands over the debacle of the Iraq invasion.

It goes, perhaps, even deeper. A case can be made that it was Blair’s disastrous foray into the Middle East that first set Britain on the road to the tragic mistake of Brexit. Since Iraq, Britain appears to have retreated into itself and turned its back on the world. The country is reluctant to get involved in international affairs. Parliament voted, perhaps wisely, not to join US air strikes against Assad in Syria. Perhaps less wisely, the UK has been content to leave dealing with Vladimir Putin to Angela Merkel and her sidekick, Francois Hollande. A former world power in retreat from the world, Britain has become introverted and isolationist. Brexit was just the next step on the way to irrelevance.

Tony Blair was, without doubt, the most talented British politician of his generation, yet his legacy is wretched. A man who seemed on that new dawn in 1997 to promise so much has betrayed even his own achievements, his own party recoiling from anything associated with his name as if it were toxic. He, who could have been so much more, deserves all the opprobrium that will be heaped on him.

But if we allow Blair to carry the blame for the disaster of Iraq alone we are deceiving ourselves. He was aided and abetted every step of the way by the Labour Party and the Conservatives, by the overwhelming majority of the British press, by vast sections of public opinion, both on the patriotic right and the worthy left — in short, by the entire British Establishment.

These are the people hiding their own guilt behind their denunciations today. They want Blair’s head in the hope that he will atone for their mistake. It is not enough simply to say he lied. If we are truly to confront the tragedy of Iraq, all those who supported the war must come clean and admit their part in it, at least to themselves.

In the aftermath of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, I cannot help thinking of that old Mitchell and Webb sketch in which the terrible truth dawns on two Nazi SS officers fighting in the Second World War: that they’re the “baddies”. I don’t think the same realistion has come to the British yet, that in the wake of last week’s disastrous Brexit vote, we are the villains of Europe.

Consider what happened. We voted to abandon our friends and allies. Even as Europe’s borders are being menaced by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, months after the mad killers of Isis struck in the hearts of Paris and Brussels, we turned our backs on them. In doing this, we managed to inflict damage not only on our own economy, but on theirs as well. We threw into uncertainty the economies of our allies around the world, from the United States to India. We took food from the mouths of their children.

And for what? Because we did not want immigrants. In other words, we left the European Union because we didn’t want their people. However much the vote was really fired by anger at inequality and poverty in Britain, when we decided to blame that on immigration we decided to blame it on our neighbours. We rejected them as people.

For 70 years, the image of Britain around the world has been forged in the fires of 1940: the nation that stood alone against Hitler and saved the world. The country that did the right thing when it mattered. No more. The Britain of The Few is gone now, their memory just a story of something that happened long ago.

Remember Nigel Farage at the European parliament, waving his little flag and his sense of inadequacy around? I worry that is the authentic face of Britain to the world now.

We have also, it seems, unleashed the twin furies of racism and xenophobia on our own streets. A video has emerged of a man being told to “go back to Africa” on a Manchester tram because of the colour of his skin. Leaflets have been distributed threatening Poles and telling them to go home. A German woman living in Britain called the radio in tears to say she was afraid to leave her house after threats from her neighbours.

Generations from now, Friday 24 June will be remembered not as Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage’s independence day, but as a day of infamy. A day when a better Britain died. Children yet unborn will curse those who did this to them.

And now the Leave campaign tell us we must unite behind the decision. You break my hopes and dreams and then you tell me to join in. You dishonour me in the eyes of the world and tell me to be a patriot. I can only reply in the words of Muhammad Ali: You my opposer when I want freedom. You my opposer when I want justice. You my opposer when I want equality. You my enemy.

This vote was all about racism. Yes, I know it was fuelled by discontent at the outrageous inequality of modern Britain. Yes, I know it fed on the anger of the dispossessed, the jobless, the people who couldn’t afford a home or find a school for their children. But when the leaders of the Leave campaign told them all we needed to do was vote the foreigners out, they made it about hatred.

Boris Johnson told people immigrants were taking money from their paypackets and their children’s places in schools, though he knew it was a lie. Michael Gove frightened people with the spectre of millions of Turks stealing into their homes in the night, though he knew it was a lie. David Cameron described the broken, huddled masses fleeing the fires of Syria as a “swarm”, though he knew it was a slur.

Johnson liked to portray himself as a latter day Churchill, but he borrowed his strategy from another Second World War leader: identify a group of outsiders and blame them for the country’s problems, and if the lie convinces enough people you can ride their hatred all the way to power. Except it didn’t quite work for Boris: some one else will reap the reward of his treachery.

And who is in charge, with our country facing its greatest crisis since the Second World War? The Prime Minister is larking about in parliament like a schoolboy who’s finished his exams. The Tory party are engaged in a ritual of blood-letting — probably good preparation for the negotiations in Brussels, in which our former allies will be more polite, but the disembowelment more complete.

Who then, will be our next prime minister? Macgove, in his friend Cameron’s blood stepped in so far that he decided to have done with Johnson as well? I doubt it, I suspect their ghosts will haunt him at the feast. Theresa May, who has watched the whole thing unfold from afar with an assassin’s wintry smile? It does not matter: none of the jackals fighting over the bones of the Conservative Party will speak up for the useful scapegoats. On the contrary, they will vie with one another to be as hostile to immigrants as they can, knowing that is what won the referendum, and that is what will deliver them power now.

And the opposition? At this hour of Britain’s greatest need, it appears they are too busy with their own problems to deal with the country’s. How does Jeremy Corbyn propose to unite Britain if he cannot even unite the Labour Party?

For all the fury with which the Tories are tearing each other apart to get to Number 10, the job of being Britain’s next prime minister will be a thankless task. I wonder if that may have had something to do with the indecent haste with which Boris Johnson quit the contest. You can tell we are in trouble when the two dominant Tories of their generation, Cameron and Johnson, have both washed their hands of it.

What exactly is the plan? Apparently it is to tell our European neighbours that they cannot come and work here and demand access to their economies anyway. The same economies we have already damaged with Brexit. Even though they have already said they will not agree to this. We’ve just done out best to wreck a union that matters deeply to them, and we’re planning to tell them we want to keep all the benefits while rejecting all the costs.

We’re told the losses of European markets this week show their economies are dependent on us, so they’ll have no choice but to go along. First we take the food from their children’s tables, then we tell them it will get worse unless they do what we want. It doesn’t sound like a recipe for peaceful coexistence to me. If you put a gun to a man’s head, don’t be surprised if he shoots you under the table. Even if this works, it will poison our relations with Europe for a generation.

The time for soundbites will soon be over. The EU has already appointed its chief Brexit negotiator while in London they are still fighting over the carcasses of the Conservative and Labour parties. Whoever will be our next prime minister can made as many pronouncements as they like , there will be no audience in the negotiating room opposite Angela Merkel, only the cold truth of history.

Right now, it seems possible that a referendum designed to end Tory infighting may succeed in destroying the Conservative party altogether, and take Labour with it into the bargain. If we do not secure a good deal from Europe the Conservatives will be blamed for the disaster of Brexit. That, I think, is why all that can be seen of Cameron and Johnson, the two party heavyweights of a generation, is their fleeing figures rapidly disappearing into the distance.

But Labour will not escape its share of the blame if it does not even turn up to the debate. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that both could be wiped out in 2020, and we could be looking at a new era in British politics.

If this vote really was, as it appears to have been, a cry of anger from the people at the political elite, then the spectacle we have witnessed since can hardly have assuaged that anger. Instead of answering the people’s cry, the politicians are using it to trample over each other in their own self-serving quest to reach the top. If we do not see some proper leadership soon, we could end up with a real revolution on our hands.

I do not want to leave it there. The Britain I know and love is in peril and I do not want to abandon it. We have heard a lot in recent days about respecting the will of the people and claims it is undemocratic to criticise the result of the referendum. Democracy does not begin and end with a single vote. It is not a football match, there is no final whistle. It would be undemocratic to ignore the result of the referendum, but there is nothing undemocratic about engaging with it.

Our entire democratic system is based around opposition. When we hold a general election, the losers are not told to shut up, they are given seats in parliament and government funding and told it is their duty to oppose the government and keep it in check. I believe it is the duty of those of us who believe our country has made a terrible mistake to continue to oppose it, to make the case against it, and to try to persuade the people to change course before it is too late.

The lights went out in Britain last week. It is up to us to relight them. It may take a long time. The hard work is just beginning.

]]>http://www.justinhuggler.com/2016/07/01/who-is-the-villain-of-brexit/feed/33572This is London Calling: Keep the Lights on in Europehttp://www.justinhuggler.com/2016/06/22/this-is-london-calling-keep-the-lights-on-in-europe/
http://www.justinhuggler.com/2016/06/22/this-is-london-calling-keep-the-lights-on-in-europe/#respondWed, 22 Jun 2016 16:35:46 +0000http://www.justinhuggler.com/?p=3543

Night lights in Europe (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 1914, on the eve of the First World War, the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey looked out of his window at the street lamps being lit, and said “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime”.

Now, on the eve of the Brexit referendum, I fear the lights may be about to start going out again in Europe — and this time the first place to fall dark will be Britain.

The European Union was built on a dream. Not a dream of common markets or free trade, but a dream that the children of those who fought the most calamitous wars in history could sit down together and share a continent in peace and goodwill. That they could share their resources and face their challenges together. A brotherhood of man. And it has worked: after centuries of war, the most blood-soaked continent in human history has enjoyed 70 years of peace.

You are holding that dream in your hands when you go to cast your vote. Take care you do not crush it. You are holding your children’s future, their chance to live in a continent at peace. Do not throw it away for a slogan and a piece of tattered flag.

We’ve heard a lot from the Leave camp about taking our country back, but I fear I am losing mine. My Britain is not a place that would turn its back on its friends and allies in their hour of need. Vladimir Putin’s tanks are menacing the borders of Eastern Europe, his planes are invading our shared airspace. The mad killers of Isis are plotting new ways to kill us. This is no time for running away.

This is London calling. Generations brought up on the Clash song perhaps do not know that the phrase goes back further. It was how the Second World War broadcasts from London to occupied Europe living under Nazi tyranny began. For generations of Europeans, that was what Britain meant: the country that did not desert them in their hour of need. On Friday London will be calling again, but what will its message be?

In the last few days, I have seen friends who have lived in Britain for more than a decade, who have British nationality and whose children were born in Britain told they are not British enough to have an opinion on Brexit. Alan Sugar, the celebrity businessman, has said Gisela Stuart has no right to an opinion because she was born in Germany, although she is a British citizen, a British member of parliament, and has lived in Britain for 42 years — longer than I have been alive. It doesn’t matter which side she’s on. My Britain is not a place where some citizens are more British than others, or where we have to submit to Alan Sugar’s race test.

I have watched as Nigel Farage unveiled a campaign poster that was almost a perfect copy of Nazi propaganda, that depicted the hungry and broken masses fleeing the burning cities of Syria as a threat to us. My Britain is not a place that deserts the needy and the desperate, or that is afraid of people because of their religion or the colour of their skin.

My Britain is not a place where a young woman MP is gunned down in the streets by a man who declared “Death to traitors”. It is the man who shot Jo Cox who is the traitor to my Britain. His name will soon be forgotten, while hers will outlive us all.

My Britain is not a place that blames its problems on immigrants. The politicians have been lying to you, and not just Farage. It is not the fault of the immigrants who work hard and pay their taxes that the government has not spent those taxes on building houses, on providing school places, on more GPs, on the NHS.

Nor are any of these things the fault of the European Union. A generation of British politicians have told you to blame immigrants and the EU for their own failure to address the problems of our country. That is classic scapegoat politics. It is always easier to blame some one else, and if you manage to convince enough people, you can ride their fury all the way to power.

But what happens when you get your way and it turns out leaving the EU or stopping the immigrants doesn’t solve the country’s problems? When there still aren’t enough jobs, or enough doctors? You’re going to need some one else to blame, and that’s what keeps me awake at night. Who will be the next scapegoat when Brexit fails to solve our problems? Second generation immigrants? British Muslims? People whose accents Alan Sugar doesn’t like?

In these final days of the campaign, it has struck me that Boris Johnson was the perfect leader for the Brexit campaign. A man who, to judge by his own public utterances, didn’t even believe in leaving the European Union until it happened to fit his personal ambitions. A man who doesn’t mind tearing his party apart to get the keys to Number 10.

That’s what Brexit is: turning our backs on our beliefs and our values, abandoning our friends and allies, for a little short-term political expediency. And it won’t even work: the experts are united that it will be an economic disaster.

This is London calling, but what’s the message in 2016? For more than 70 years, the international image of Britain has been one forged in the fires of 1940. Whatever out differences, the rest of the world has looked on us as a country that can be trusted, when it really matters, to do the right thing. If we vote to leave, I fear Britain will be something quite different in the eyes of the world: the country that cut and ran, the country that abandoned its allies, selfish and treacherous.

That is what you are holding in your hands when you cast your vote, but more than that you are holding hopes and dreams. We all of us walk in one another’s dreams, every day, but on Thursday you will carry with you to the polling booth the hopes and dreams of a continent, of 500 million people, of your children and of children yet unborn. Do not abandon them. It is an awesome responsibility. Do not let the lights go out over Europe.

Not Nigel Farage. Though he showed us the broken and helpless and told us to fear them. They fled crucifixion and poison gas and he told us to hate them. “If voting doesn’t work, violence is next,” he said. But that’s just Nigel, that’s his way. Did you see him on the Thames? You’ve got to put Britain first, you see.

Not David Cameron. Though he told us a “swarm” was coming across the sea to take advantage of us. David Cameron is an honourable man. he was just trying to defend us. You’ve got to put Britain first, you see.

Not Boris Johnson. Though he said the American President doesn’t like us because he’s black. An “ancestral dislike”, he said. But that’s just Boris, that’s his way. This is his chance, his best shot at PM. You’ve got to put Boris first, you see.

Not Michael Gove. Though he told us the Turks were coming, that migrants are a “direct cost to us all”. Michael Gove is an honourable man, he believes what he says. You’ve got to put Britain first, you see.

Not the Daily Mail. Though they told us the refugees are terrorists, you can’t let them in. Just imagine what might happen if you did: innocent women gunned down in the streets, children left without a mother. You can’t let that happen, you’ve got to put Britain first, you see.

The man who pulled the trigger appeared in court today. He’s disturbed, so they say. He’s been told for so long foreigners are the problem and everything will be alright if they just go away. He put Britain first, you see.

Jo Cox is dead. She said we could help. If we can’t take everyone, we can at least take the children, she said. She put people first, you see.

Who killed Jo Cox? Just a madman, a crazed loner. Don’t try to make sense of it, you’ll only divide us. You’ve got to put Britain first, you see.

That is no country for the young, where the old plan to rob their children of a future just to bask in the nostalgia of a past that never was. That is what the British people plan to do next week, if they vote to leave the European Union. They will turn out in their millions to vote away their children’s inheritance, because they are scared of a world that has grown too large for them.

I remember as a child asking my grandmother, a Londoner born and bred, if she thought life was better when she was young — I think I was just looking to hear some of her stories, she was forever on about the past. But she looked at me and said “Oh no, we had the Blitz. They were bombing us, you see, every day.”

If you want to understand what the European Union is about, you won’t find the answers in Brussels. Go out, instead, to the poppy fields of France and Belgium, where thousands of young European soldiers died in agony from chlorine and mustard gas. Go to the Somme, where more than a million were killed and maimed. Go to Auschwitz.

Today, you can drive across the border between France and Germany without noticing it. People commute to work past Verdun, where 700,000 fell, across the border that was the frontline of two world wars. That is the work of the European Union.

Go out to the border between Germany and Poland, where the Nazis killed six million and razed the capital, Warsaw, to the ground. Today people stroll across the border to shop. It is a place of peace and cooperation. That is what the European Union is about.

The European Union was founded on the idea that the nations who fought the most calamitous wars in history could put aside their rivalries and work together for their children’s future. They would no longer compete for the continent’s land and resources, they would share it. A brotherhood of man. And it has worked: the European Union has brought half a century of peace to the most war-ravaged continent in history. That is what the Brexiteers want to turn their back on.

And for what? Leaving will free us from red tape and unnecessary regulation, they say, but it’s not really true. The British were world champions at red tape long before the European Union was ever dreamed of: just look at the reams of needless health and safety laws which come from Westminster, not Brussels.

A vote to leave won’t save you from red tape: it will just mean the regulations are written by Michael Gove. Gove, the Robespierre of this revolution, doesn’t want freedom from Brussels for you, he wants it for himself. Citizen Govespierre will sit up late into the night, his pen scratching out laws for every detail of your life. It doesn’t matter how much mayhem he unleashes on the way to his paradise, Citizen Govespierre knows best.

And Boris Johnson? Everybody loves a clown, they say, but children are scared of clowns and they’re right. The smile is just a mask, behind it a cold man hungry for power. Fifty years of peace won’t stand in Boris’ way. He’ll be dangling from that zipwire, grinning at you as the country slides into ruin.

And it doesn’t matter how many stern pronouncements they make about the “supremacy of parliament”, you can’t simply stamp your feet and get your own way when it comes to dealing with other countries. There are only two ways to conduct foreign affairs: talk or war.

If Britain wants to go on trading with other European countries, it will have to reach agreements with their governments. The European Union is one way of doing that; the alternative is years of negotiations in which Britain will try to get a deal as good as the one it already has.

But I don’t think that’s what most people are deciding on. I think this vote is about identity, and that is why David Cameron has failed so miserably with his ill-advised Project Fear campaign. I think generations of Britons are already afraid.

They are afraid of losing their identity in a new world of wider horizons, that they will somehow lose their Britishness by embracing their European identity. And I want to tell them that’s not true, that the reasons other Europeans want them to stay are not economic or political: they’re emotional.

When Germany’s Der Spiegel published a heartfelt plea for Britain to remain in the EU, it illustrated it with a drawing of John Cleese performing the Ministry of Silly Walks. Our neighbours want Britain to be part of Europe for our humour, our uniqueness, our difference. For Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen. For the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. And for those extraordinary days in 1940 when a nation of shopkeepers stood alone and saved the world.

I write looking out my window on Berlin, where Germans still live among the ruins of the Second World War. That is why there is no support for leaving the EU here: to the Germans, the War is not a bedtime story of derring-do. The ghosts are still alive for them, just as they were for my grandmother.

In the years since she told me of the Blitz, I’ve been out into the world and seen war for myself, in the Balkans, in Iraq, in Afghanistan. And I know the future does not belong to angry men clinging to tattered flags.

Yet they are on the rise again, from Donald Trump in America to Vladimir Putin in Russia. This is no time to turn our backs on the world.

Of course there are problems with the European Union: only a fool would deny it. But leaving instead of staying to fix them is like burning your own house down because the roof leaks.

Before you vote, look at your children, your grandchildren, and picture a future where they are free to follow their hopes and dreams wherever they take them in Europe, from the forests of Finland to the mountains of Spain, from the poppy fields of France to the rebuilt cities of Poland.

In 1940, Churchill looked out on a Europe that lay at Hitler’s feet, and vowed “We shall never surrender”. But that’s what a vote to leave is: in the end, exit is just running away.

]]>http://www.justinhuggler.com/2016/06/14/a-vote-to-leave-is-just-running-away/feed/03410Meeting the Yazidis: an Encounter with the “Devil-Worshippers” of Iraqhttp://www.justinhuggler.com/2014/08/08/meeting-the-yazidis-an-encounter-with-the-devil-worshippers-of-iraq/
http://www.justinhuggler.com/2014/08/08/meeting-the-yazidis-an-encounter-with-the-devil-worshippers-of-iraq/#respondFri, 08 Aug 2014 16:04:04 +0000http://www.justinhuggler.com/?p=3242When I went to meet the Yazidis, the “devil-worshippers” of Iraq, I thought I had found a strange and improbable oasis of peace in that ravaged land.

I remember the Yazidis were so amazed to be visited by a journalist from another country that they took photographs ofme. Though they were surrounded by the mayhem and violence of Iraq, their villages in the shadow of the Sinjar mountains seemed an echo of an older Iraq. Children played in the fields, and the men chuckled as they told me how they had chased away Kurdish fighters who tried to take control of the area.

Now those villages are a battleground. Many of the people have fled into the Sinjar mountains, where they are stranded without food or water, surrounded by Islamic State (Isis) fighters intent on converting them by the sword — or killing them. Unless help gets to them soon, there are fears they will be the victims of a genocide.

One more group of innocent victims to reap the whirlwind we sowed in Iraq when we invaded and toppled Saddam Hussein without so much as a plan of what to do next.

But my mind goes back to that sunlit afternoon of 2003 when I finally tracked down the Yazidis of Sinjar, the last remaining community of their ancient people to survive in their homeland in the Middle East.

The quest to find the Yazidis has begun for me years earlier, when I was a young freelance reporter in Turkey, and I came upon reports of a strange devil-worshipping sect who lived in the south-east of the country. I spent days on the road in Turkey, trying to find a Yazidi, but everyone told me they were gone, the last of them fled from an unrelenting campaign of perecution by the authorities because of their religious beliefs. Until one day, in the scruffy outskirts of a beaten down town in the Kurdish south-east, a man reluctantly showed me his tattered ID card with the telltale entry under religion, the “XXX” that told the Turkish police and anyone else who cared to know that he was Yazidi, a member of a religion too unspeakable even to name.

After that, I found a Yazidi organisation in Germany, where many of those who fled persecution in their homelands, in Turkey, Syria, Georgia and Armenia, lived. And I learned from a Yazidi activist called Telim Tolan that they are not Devil-worshippers at all, but one of the Middle East’s most tragically misunderstood and persecuted communities.

The Yazidis do not worship Satan. But they do worship a fallen angel, Malek Tawwus, or the Peacock King. The difference is that in the Yazidi religion, God forgave the fallen angel and restored him to heaven, where he is an intermediary between God and man, who is also fallible, who also sins and must seek forgiveness.

And from Telim I learnt that there was a community of Yazidis still alive and well in the Middle East, in Iraq. But it was years until I got the chance to visit them, when I found myself covering the occupation of Iraq for The Independent. When I told my translator and driver I wanted to visit the Yazidis, they weren’t happy. To them, as to most Iraqis, the Yazidis were bogeymen, mad worshippers of Satan who lived far out from civilisation in their villages and practised their strange and demented ways.

As we set off from Mosul, the people there warned us “Don’t even mention Satan there, or they’ll make trouble for you.” We had to pass through American checkpoints manned by lazy soldiers in the burning sun. Back then, the fighting hadn’t come to Mosul yet, and it was a welcome holiday from the fear and danger of Baghdad.

The Yazidi villages were like travelling back in time – or into a land of stories. The men wore their hair in long plaits, like Asterix and Obelix, or had huge and wild untrimmed moustaches.Some wore exotic clothes and hats. One man pulled out a carved wooden flute, and began playing a strange and ancient tune.

I sat with them in the sun as they explained their traditions and culture to me, how they are not allowed to wear the colour blue or eat lettuce, although no one there could remember why. How one of their holy books, the Black Book, disappeared in colonial times, and the Yazidis believe it was stolen by the British and is kept in London. How they kept its teachings alive through the Talkers, who are taught the entire text by heart as children, and hand it on to their own sons in time. How most of the men there had married by “kidnapping” their wives in a formalised elopement ritual, with ther brides’ consent. How they do not believe in an afterlife, but in reincarnation, which they call the soul “changing its clothes”.

I had stepped into a world that had been preserved against all the odds, in the Middle East’s most dangerous country, while all around it had been eradicated elsewhere. An ancient religion that had somehow survived where first Christianity and then Islam had wiped out all others.

There was something contented about the Yazidis that afternoon. They had just seen off an attempt by Kurdish forces to take over the area, and they were confident they would go on surviving, as they have for so long.

Now it seems a mirage, an illusion, that quiet afternoon of calm. In the villages I visited, the men are barricaded in, armed and ready to die to defend their homeland.

On the mountains above, men, women and children are facing a choice between starvation or surrender to the fighters of the Islamic State – if they don’t die of thirst in the savagely hot Iraqi summer.

When we invaded Iraq in 2003, our leaders made grand speeches about guaranteeing the future for all of Iraq’s people. But then we let the place slide into anarchy and bloodshed, while our soldiers stood helplessly by.

This is the future we made for Iraq.

This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post Blog on 8 August 2014

An Iraqi Army unit prepares to board a Blackhawk helicopter for a counterinsurgency mission in Baghdad (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Iraq war was always about oil. The ISIS extremists who are trying to seize control of the country’s largest refinery know that. Everyone was braced for the battle for Baghdad. But first they went after the oil. Just like the Americans.

In 2003, when Baghdad was a chaos of looting, the one thing the Americans secured was the Oil Ministry. Because oil is power.

If all you’ve got is a cave on a mountain side somewhere in Afghanistan, you have to do something really big to get the world’s attention, like flying a couple of 767s into the tallest building in New York.

But if you’ve got oil, and if you control enough of it, then you can hold the world to ransom. Just like the Russians.

That’s what Vladimir Putin’s doing. While everyone was looking the other way at Iraq, he’s just switched off the gas supply to Ukraine. And that’s an implicit threat to much of Europe, which depends on Russia for its gas.

Oil is even more important than gas. The global economy depends on it. It’s not how much the oil you have is worth today, it’s how much economic damage you can inflict by cutting off the supply.

The Americans invaded Iraq for many reasons, but it would never have happened if the oil wasn’t there. And now a war which the US fought because of Iraqi oil may be about to end in handing that oil over to Al-Qaeda.

Of course, the world can stand some of the oil being cut off, as it did with Iranian oil for years. It can make up the shortfall elsewhere.

But it’s worse than that in Iraq. Because what is happening there is a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The Saudis finance and support ISIS, and the Iranians back the Iraqi government and the Iraqi Shia militias.

And between them, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia control the largest oil reserves in the world.

What if some one decides all the oil is now in play? That Iraq is on the verge of breaking up, and its oil is there for the taking?

What if the Shia decide to make a bid for the Saudi oil reserves, which lie just across the border from Shia-controlled southern Iraq, in an area of Saudi Arabia with a large Shia population?

Of course, that’s unthinkable for now. But a couple of weeks ago, it was unthinkable that a few thousand extremists loyal to Al-Qaeda would put the Iraqi army to flight, seize control of Iraq’s second city and a vast swathe of the country, and be at the gates of Baghdad.

If the oil does come into play, there is no way the outside world will stand by. The region’s oil reserves are simply too important to the world economy. If the US does not take decisive action, then others will. China’s massive economy, for one, needs that oil.

All sorts of players could make a bid for the oil. For now, Kirkuk’s reserves are in Kurdish hands, but how long would Turkey stand by and let its historic enemies enjoy that wealth, in a region it regards as its backyard?

Now, ten years after it started an unnecessary war because of Iraqi oil, a reluctant US could be forced to fight a new war, over the same Iraqi oil.

And it will be Russia that benefits most. Vladimir Putin doesn’t need to lift a finger. He will see the value of his own vast oil reserves – and the power they confer – soar.

It is the sort of situation that could set off a regional war, even a world war.

We are not, thankfully, anywhere near that yet. ISIS are fighting for control of a refinery, not the oil fields, which are under control. For now.

But the fighting at the Baiji oil refinery is a warning of just how dangerous the situation in Iraq is for the world.

This post originally appeared on The Huffington Post Blog on 20 June 2014

Everything they told you about Syria was wrong. The story where the noble, brave resistance were fighting to liberate their country. The story where Assad was the one the world had to worry about. Well, those resistance fighters have shown their faces now. And they are the butchers of ISIS, beheading their way through Iraq towards Baghdad.

Syria and Iraq are the same war. They have been for a long time. ISIS is fighting in both countries, it wants to establish a single Taliban-style state across them. ISIS was born in Iraq. When it was losing against the Shia there it crossed into Syria. Now it has returned to Iraq, hellbent on revenge.

It is a proxy war. It is being fought out in the cities and villages of Iraq and Syria, but it is being directed and maniplated from behind the scenes by men in the shadows.

The governments of Saudi Arabia and Iran are fighting their own war to the last drop of Syrian and Iraqi blood.

It is a struggle for the future of the Middle East, and it is being fought out above the largest and most important oil reserves in the world.

But it is a war in which they have unleashed terrifying extremists they cannot hope to control.

Saudi Arabia finances and arms ISIS and their allies. Iran supports the Iraqi government, and finances and arms the Iraqi Shia militia and the Assad regime in Syria.

What we have seen in Iraq in the past week was fomenting while we were still obssessed with Assad and agitating for air strikes against his regime.

If Barack Obama had gone ahead with air strikes on Syria, the US would have become Al-Qaeda’s air force.

Assad is a callous dictator who should one day answer for his crimes. The Syrian civil war began as a popular uprising against him. But it was hijacked by ISIS and its allies and rivals in extremism. Only the West didn’t notice, carried away with its narrative of the evil dictator and the good rebels. In some wars, there are no good guys.

Our obssession with Assad is our obssession with Saddam Part II. And in both cases our fantasy belief that if you remove the evil dictator all will be well has led to disaster.

When we removed Saddam, we fatally disturbed the balance of power in the Middle East. The Shia of Iraq saw their chance to seize power. That didn’t just enrage the Sunnis of Iraq, it sent shockwaves through the region.

Sunni extremists began streaming across the border to join the fight against the Shia. The Iraqi civil war began, and ISIS was born.

Iran backed its Shia brethren in Iraq. With Sunni domination under threat on its border, Saudi Arabia turned to an old tactic. It backed the Sunni extremists.

Iran and Saudi Arabia are facing off across Iraq. Between them, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia control the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Already, ISIS are close to the oil reserves of northern Iraq. Already, the price of oil is rising.

If the oil comes seriously into play in this war, it is unthinkable that the rest of the world will stay out.

In the meantime, extremists Saudi Arabia cannot really control are in possession of a huge swathe of Iraq and Syria. They want to set up their own state. If they do, it will be an Al-Qaeda Caliphate on Europe’s doorstep, openly hostile to the West.

They are much more dangerous than a smalltime dictator like Saddam or Assad. They are a movement. You cannot stop them by overthrowing an individual. They are not interested in their own survival. They expect their reward in the next world. They are concerned only with imposing their beliefs.

All this has happened because of the decision to topple Saddam. There are more dangerous things than dictators.